[Alex63]

Gartner's publicity pieces, including hype cycles and magic quadrants, serve the purpose of giving non-technical executives and decision makers a high-level understanding of the risk of choosing a particular technology or vendor. For these users, all that matters is getting a snapshot of the present moment.

Gartner also sells research and analysis reports, and subscriptions for these services. These materials, IME, are of higher quality and can be a good introduction or exploration of a particular issue or technology. But they are definitely more oriented toward the senior leader than to the person in the trenches.

[crwalker]

Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked through the longer publications in detail.